Pity the poor MRA meme-makers. It’s hard for them to find real-world images to illustrate their deeply held belief that women in general (and feminists in particular) secretly or not-so-secretly run the world.
Indeed, there seems to be a lot of photographic evidence that supports a rather different conclusion about women and power. Do women run the US congress? Nope.
The Supreme Court? Nope. (Dudes circled for easy reference.)
Corporate Boards of Directors? Nope and nope and nope and nope and nope and nope.
Happily for MRAs there are still some options left – like stock photos.
The word of stock photos is a strange one indeed, one filled with women laughing alone with salad and cheering themselves while crouched on scales in their underwear.
Oh, and did I mention that stock photo sites like to make their pics of women sexxxxayy? And that they seem to have the same confusion between sexy and sexist as Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap?
Indeed, when Cate Savilla of Buzzfeed recently tried some common female-centric search terms on stock photo sites, these were some of the weirdly sexualized pictures that showed up in the results.
Bingo!
Apparently a lot of guys imagine feminism as some kind of session with a dominatrix. Never mind that in the real world, men getting trod upon on by women in high heels often pay quite handsomely for the experience. No, in the minds of the world’s MRAs this is a perfect image to represent the jackbooted high heeled stormtroopers of feminazi-ism.
Attach a vaguely threatening caption, and the URL for A Voice for Men, and you’ve got yourself a meme!
H/T — MUH Men’s Rights Activism and Philip Rose
UPDATE: I just realized that I featured this meme before. Well, the post still stands.
Daintydougal, since the fight literally 100 percent of your participation has been drive-by posts with passive-aggressive comments. And I can confidently say that no, this blog does not welcome passive-aggressive hit-and-run posting.
Long speculative answer FWIW, since I don’t have mod powers and I’m not David:
With the risk of resurrecting some DOOM here, but… Some feminists say that the existence of gender identity depends on our sexist society making both sex and gender seem important, and if there was no sexism in society, all gender identities would just sort of evaporate. Other feminists say that gender is an important part of their identity, they wouldn’t even want to live in a society with no gender, although they certainly want a society without sexism, and it doesn’t seem plausible that gender identities will ever evaporate anyway.
FWIW I’m somewhat sympathetic to the first point of view, although I can’t say that people who say that gender is an important part of their identity thereby have misidentified what’s objectively important. If it’s important to you, it’s important to you, and I don’t believe in free-floating importance anyway.
Whether it is plausible or implausible that gender identities will evaporate in non-sexist society, I have no idea. I don’t think body dysphoria would completely evaporate in any case; there seems to be some empirical support for the thesis that some really strong body dysphorias in transsexual people have at least some neurological basis (structures in the brain that has to do with how you feel your body parts relating to each other and so on are actually not really wired to fit the body nature gave you).
Anyway, I definitely think you can be “gender critical” in the sense that you believe gender identities ultimately depend on sexism for their existence and would evaporate in a non-sexist society without being transphobic.
In reality, from what I’ve seen, that kind of stance very often (not always, but very very often) is connected to transphobia.
It seems obvious that a certain phenomenon might depend on external factors and still be very real. Like, if I had grown up in a different society where I wasn’t as well-fed when I grew up, I might have been shorter. So my height depends on the society I grew up in, but I really am this height. I hardly believe that me and Husband somehow have it programmed into our genes to love each other, but we still really do love each other. Money is an obvious social construct, but I can’t stop paying off my loans and just think them away, because money and everything involving money is still very much real. So social construct=/=not really real, can be made to go away by positive thinking or the right kind of therapy.
But for many people who talk about how gender is nothing but a social construct, it seems like a short step from that position to the claim that trans people are somehow just imagining things. That trans people are just people who have bought into society’s gender stereotypes and mistakenly believe that if you like cooking and the colour pink you have to be a woman, and if you like beer and football you have to be a man, and if only they could come to realize that this isn’t the case they would stop being trans. And that’s a transphobic and very hurtful prejudice. Even if you feel sorry for trans people and regard them as victims of society’s sexism, if someone says that for them transitioning didn’t have anything to do with gender roles and it was all about their body feeling completely alien to them before transitioning and they suffered horribly from this feeling, and you go “no, you’re mistaken here, it was really all about gender roles” in response, that’s also not okay. You can’t deny people their experiences like that.
It’s also transphobic and plain wrong to claim that male privilege overall depends on whether you were born with a penis or not. Yeah, as long as a transwoman looks like a man she’s at less of a risk for sexual harassment and rape, that’s true enough. However, when she no longer looks like a man, people will either a) perceive her as a a cis-woman, and then she faces the same risks as any other cis-woman, or b) perceive her as trans, in which case her risks are much higher. If she’s perceived as trans, she may also face harassment and bullying from other women, even in supposed feminist spaces, to a degree that cis women rarely faces. Plus, trans women frequently talk about how they weren’t safe from all this harmful socialization that young girls are subject to merely because people didn’t consciously aim these messages at them – they still sucked them up. So the idea that male privilege depends on being born with a penis is just plain wrong and prejudiced.
Overall, then, it really depends on what’s included in the term “gender-critical” whether it’s equal to transphobia or not. The terms are not important, it’s what kind of ideas they’re used to cover.
Thank you for the response Dvärghundspossen, lots of stuff to think about. Katz, jump down off your high horse. Asking for clarity that is sorely lacking isn’t passive aggressive and if that is your reaction to a basic question no wonder so many people have left.
To go back to sports, because that’s much simpler, it depends on how one defines better. Maybe men are better at basketball because they can dunk baskets more often. Maybe women are better because being shorter it’s inherently more difficult to put a ball in the hoop and they have to develop more skills to be a decent player.
Or you can look at figure skating. Men can do quadruple jumps and triple axles. Women do triple jumps and double axles. The male skaters are stronger and can do bigger jumps. But, the women are more flexible. They do tighter faster spins with better and more interesting positions. The jumps are flashier and the untrained eye notices them exclusively. But big fans of the sport know that spins are just as important.
Dainty, you’re welcome. One more addition to what I said above: If one dreams of a genderless society as a feminist utopia (and as I said, I’m personally attracted to that vision), one should probably ask oneself whether one really imagines that society as genderless or whether one actually imagines that everyone’s cis. In a genderless society, we’d only have one pronoun for all people. No one would say stuff like “I met this woman/man yesterday who…” but always “I met this person yesterday who…”. We’d have no female/male in passports or on ID:s, etc. Basically, we might retain the categories “man/woman” in specific medical contexts, but no one would use these words otherwise. That would be a completely genderless society, and it’s different from everyone being cis.
Hugger’s basket ball example made me imagine a society where sports achievements were measured in how much individual difficulty you had overcome by training… 🙂 That would be… interestingly different from what we have now (probably impossible in practice, but it’s interesting to think about).
Lea: You don’t think I’m being sincere so I’m not going to try and convince you otherwise, but if you care to read my explanation of what I was trying to say, then here it is:
It’s probably more fun if you think of me as an MRA shill but the truth is sometimes I just don’t think before I type.
I realize now that I wasn’t taking into account the cultural context in which MRAs say “yeah but some women like being submissive” when it’s irrelevant, and David says “men getting trod upon on by women in high heels often pay quite handsomely for the experience” when it’s inappropriate to do so (in my opinion). I shouldn’t have said “Please don’t sink down to the level of the MRAs.” and I see how that gave you the impression that I thought both actions I was criticizing were equally bad. I do not believe that and shouldn’t have said what I did because when I look back at it I realize it does sound like I believe that.
I realize women stepping on men (in whatever shoes), and female-on-male domestic violence overall is not an epidemic like male-on-female DV, though I see how my comment made it sound like I didn’t know that.
What David said still reminds me of MRAs bringing up some women bring submissive (when it isn’t appropriate to do so, in my opinion), simply because both are irrelevant to the thing being discussed (in the case of this post it was the photo of the woman stepping on the man’s face which the MRAs seemed to be framing as violence against a man, and the photo tagged ‘feminism’ of the woman stepping on the man). And in my opinion that makes it inappropriate to state them, which is what I was trying to complain about (ineffectively). I am not asking you to agree with me, I am just explaining my opinion.
I was upset so I didn’t do that well in my initial comment but in the future if I complain/comment again I’ll try to be clearer. I still believe some of what I said but I made a fool of myself. Whoops.
suffrajitsu: My initial comment was directed at David (I quoted him in it, not a commenter). I should have made that more clear, though, and I’m sorry for failing to do so. I didn’t read the comments here (I do sometimes but not always) so was not criticizing anyone in them. Were you referring to David, or commenters when you said ‘we’? I’m wondering if you’d like me to respond to what you said or if you only typed that because you thought I was criticizing a commenter. I’m really sorry, I should have been more clear.
Note about email: I don’t remember what email I used before and I hope I’m using the same one now but if I’m not I am still the same Dolores, really! I would use a gravatar profile thing but I don’t have a wordpress account.
Dvärghundspossen,
Thank you for your 3.16 post. Beautifully put.
Meaningless!
You know that the power of sexy butts is invisible and all pervasive, like the air we breathe, and we men are helpless before it.
I’ve never been a prolific commenter, but the increase in transphobia here did make me quit reading the comments in depth for a long while.
Ha! Yes, those stock photos depict real women. I do that somewhere in between kitchen and laundry cleaning.
I flounced about two years ago, took a break. I’m back. I just can’t mock like everyone else can. This stuff hits me in the gut, really pisses me off and then i can’t let it go. I try to take it easy for my own mental and emotional health.
Dolores,
I wasn’t having fun by pointing out what seemed like the obvious to me. Normally when I have to do that I’m talking to an MRA.
Tina,
Good for you for taking care of yourself.
Hahaha. OT but I’ve just been told in a newspaper comment thread:
Yay! I feel like I’ve achieved something.
@Dolores I can see where you’re coming from, but the point David’s post is trying to make is that when it comes to graphic persuasion, the MRM is utterly inept and tone-deaf. Their memes provide a direct visual glimpse into their fantasies of how the world works (or should work). It’s natural to wonder why it is that so many of their memes depict feminists in hyper-sexualized terms, and depict gender relations in classic BDSM terms. There’s a clear pattern there. In MRA!Meme!World, relationships are a power struggle, and all women have to be cheesecake fantasy pinups or else the space-time continuum will explode, so the memes tend to be of two varieties: “put feminists back in their place” (by depicting feminists as sultry underwear models) or “look at how scary feminists are” (by depicting feminists as high-heeled dominatrices). There is nothing about women that doesn’t revolve around sex for them. It’s offensive, unrealistic bullshit put out by people with no clue how bad they are at optics.
I think it’s fair to point out the heavy reliance on BDSM imagery and ask what’s up with that. It’s also fair to say these guys lead very rich fantasy lives, since 99% of what they complain about is happening only inside their heads. Those two dots aren’t very far apart, if one cares to connect them.
@fruitloopsie – I’m OK, thanks for asking! I was kidding around, though – our school didn’t actually have a junior varsity green bucket team. 🙂 I kind of wish they had, though.
“our school didn’t actually have a junior varsity green bucket team.”
How’s your school gonna brainwash kids into worshipping feminism without a green bucket team? The bucket game is the gateway activity to stepping on men while wearing high heels! You should write a strongly worded letter to your local feminist high command representative.
While I would LOVE a world where the stupid gender markers on my documentation are totally irrelevant, I would NOT want to live in a world where there is no concept of gender identity at all.
Because that erases my life just as much as living in this world now. It’s still saying I’m not what I say I am and have been saying for years. I went through a LOT of legal and medical hoops to get myself to this point, and would not have ended up homeless if surgery hadn’t cleaned out my savings a year before the Big Crash of 2012. (Because trans surgery then wasn’t covered by really any insurance. Ask me why!)
If a utopia is one that specifically bars people like me, then it’s not one I want any part in. I feel people should feel free to have any gender or lack of such that they want, and pursue the care they need.
Though I don’t agree with Dvarghundspossen that looking like a man protects one from rape and transphobia. Trans women often talk about how the start of transition is the most terrifying. It’s not just because it’s new and scary, it’s because passing can be a matter of life and death, and that’s hardest when you first start out. Leelah Alcorn, for instance, was still dragged to deprogramming camp!
That would be a wonderful point if the MRAs had made it clear that the stepping on was non-consensual, but as it stands, it just looks like they’re shaming male subs, which is something they always do. (For example, look at all the memes where they shame pegging and other consensual sexual acts just because the men are submissive). Us thinking that the man is consenting to having his face stepped on is an easy mistake to make considering that it is not easy to step on the face of someone who is physically larger than you without their consent.
Perhaps this is MRAs (muddled) attempt at demonstrating women’s social power; basically saying “look at how socially powerful women are, that they can grind their high heels into the faces of physically stronger men!” However, It’s funny that this statement shows more than the MRAs would like; of all the violence that women nonconsensually inflict on men, nonconsensual face stepping doesn’t actually exist. Men don’t submit to having their faces stepped on without permission, women don’t have that kind of power, the MRA’s fantansy world doesn’t actually exist.
@LBT: If Hubby wants toddler pics, let him feast his eyes!
Here’s my little girl in the snow:
http://i.imgur.com/juKvPZ0.jpg
And my little boy in the snow:
http://i.imgur.com/COcb396.jpg
LBT, sorry, I was a bit unclear. I definitely don’t want to say that “looking like a man” protects you from transphobia, obviously it doesn’t, there are a million examples of that. What I should have said is that you’re at a lower risk of rape and sexual harassment as long as everyone perceives you as “a regular guy”. However, some trans women might never have been perceived that way. And I definitely don’t wanna claim that this is some great advantage either; if you feel like shit because you’re hiding who you are from everyone around you and you feel like a stranger in your own body etc. etc., it’s really no comfort to be told that hey, you’re less likely to get raped than certain other people are.
Regarding a genderless society, yeah, seems like most people who’ve transitioned feel like you do, LBT. That’s why I say that although I personally feel attracted to the idea of a genderless society, I definitely don’t wanna push it at anyone as an ideal.
It actually makes sense not to attack the whole concept of gender identities even if you’re convinced that they’re inherently bad because they depend on sexism for their existence. Attacking that concept will hurt a lot of people, and is extremely likely in practice to be directed much more toward trans people than cis people. Plus, and this is really important, if gender identities really do depend on sexism for their existence, they’re gonna evaporate naturally when we get closer to a post-patriarchal society, even if no one battles them. On the other hand, if we do get close to a post-patriarchal society and it turns out that gender is still an important part of their identity for a lot of people, everyone ought to recognize that gender identities seem to exist independently of sexism and then conclude that there’s nothing wrong with them.
@Falconer: They’re adorable!
@Spindrift Blame Title IX! If the girls had had a bucket team, the boys would’ve had to have one as well.
We did have an intramural “bucket club” where we practiced arranging our legs into improbable disconnected positions, so that we could increase our man-stepping radius.
@LBT:
The way I see it, it’s not about pretending there are no differences between one group and another. It’s about recognising the differences and it not mattering where it actually doesn’t matter (but still mattering where it genuinely does, which isn’t often).
I notice people being all about the difference between themselves and others – but it’s the hate that some people imbue it with, when really, wtf difference does it make to them?
As Hawking said recently, it’d be nice if we could tone down human aggression.
@LBT:
I wonder about this actually, what a “world without gender” would truly mean… Because since we’re talking about the gender that is a social construct, and knowing that trans-ness has biological foundations, you’d still get trans folks in that world. It would just be a different experience. Hopefully a better one.
There would still be chromosomes and those chromosomes would still lead statistically to certain body configurations, and there would still be people who were unhappy or dysphoric with the body configuration they were born with. But you’d lose any idea of performative gender, so seeking to change your body would literally just be considered seeking to change your body and nothing more, like trying to bulk up to be like a body builder or get plastic surgery to change the way your face looks. “Passing” wouldn’t exist per se because there wouldn’t be a category to attempt to “pass” as. Anything other than changing your body wouldn’t be motivated by trying to “fit in” as a particular gender, and wouldn’t be encouraged or discouraged.
That’s the way I’d imgine it working anyway… I dunno if it’s still not great or if it’s better.
And holy crapsicles you’re back! Welcome back, I hope you stick around! *waves*
Idk that all body changes would be considered the same. If the hypothesis that at least some body dysphoria has a neurological basis is true, it would follow that you’d still have reconfiguring your body covered by either public health care or health insurance (depending on your political system) in these cases, because this kind of body dysphoria would be considered a sort of disability and treatment for it a medical treatment. Many other ways that people change their bodies would be considered mere beauty treatments and not so covered. So you’d still have that distinction. However, in a genderless society we wouldn’t talk about gender reassignment surgery, we’d call it body dyshporia treatment or something along these lines instead, and everyone, regardless of the bodily transitions they went through, would be a “they” or a “zie” from birth to death.
Note again that I’m not saying that a genderless society would objectively be a good thing, I’m just making a thought experiment here.